Stephanie Weirich was honored with SIGPLAN’s Distinguished Service Award in recognition of her sustained and far-reaching contributions to the programming languages community. This recognition follows another major milestone: Stephanie was also named a 2025 ACM Fellow, honored “for contributions to static type systems and mechanized mathematics of programming languages.” Together, these awards reflect both the scholarly impact of her research and her long-standing commitment to service and community leadership within computer science.
“I’m thankful to SIGPLAN for the award and am grateful that I have had the chance to collaborate with many members of the programming languages research community in numerous service roles.”
Stephanie Weirich
Over many years, Stephanie has played a central role in strengthening SIGPLAN through leadership, mentorship, and service that has shaped both the community’s structure and its culture. Her work reflects a deep commitment to building inclusive, supportive environments for researchers across career stages—values that closely align with the mission of Penn Engineering and the CIS department.
Among her most visible contributions is her role as a co-founder of the Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop (PLMW), which launched at POPL 2012 in Philadelphia and has since grown into a flagship mentoring program across multiple SIGPLAN conferences, including PLDI, SPLASH, and ICFP. Stephanie has also been deeply engaged in initiatives that support community well-being, including SIGPLAN CARES and the SIGPLAN long-term mentoring program. In addition, she served as General Chair of ICFP 2020, leading the conference through the rapid and complex transition to a fully virtual format during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic—an effort that helped establish lasting models for future virtual and hybrid conferences.
Reflecting on the Distinguished Service Award, Stephanie emphasized the collaborative nature of this work and expressed gratitude to SIGPLAN and to the many colleagues she has worked alongside over the years. She highlighted the shared leadership behind key initiatives and underscored the extensive teamwork that made ICFP 2020 possible. Taken together, Stephanie’s honors—from the ACM Fellowship to the SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award—recognize a career defined not only by technical excellence, but by sustained care, mentorship, and leadership within the broader computer science community.
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